newsminer.com

It had been about 19 years since I last sat at a table in what used to be Harry’s Bar and Grill in downtown Sacramento. Now, on one night early last month and all these years later, the spot on that 4th Avenue corner was serving me a chicken Caesar salad rather than a Michelob.

On this 45-degree weeknight, on a quick side trip to a favorite city on the way back to Alaska from Florida, I looked out a window I had looked out of back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and saw emptiness. Literally.

The Sacramento Union building, the building that housed “The Oldest Daily in the West” until its end in 1996, was gone. The old home was razed in 2006, and all that remains to this day is a fenced-off excavated lot.

Nothing is left at the last home of the newspaper for which Mark Twain worked so long ago. Nothing at all from what I could see at a perch atop the four-story parking garage on an adjacent lot just a handful of blocks from California’s capitol building.

I’m a sucker for memories.

The Union died a dozen years ago, but it had been dying for a long time, squeezed out by the rival Sacramento Bee, Another two-newspaper city was scratched from the list of such fortunate places.

And now, all these years later, the Bee itself is weakened as part of the struggling company that owns it. The circumstances are different from in The Union’s day, but a paper is apparently hurting nonetheless.

You’d think I’d take a certain satisfaction in seeing a former competitor suffer. I did at first, just like I did for a while as I watched the Anchorage Daily News decline over the years after its 1992 defeat of The Anchorage Times, where I worked after leaving The Union prior to its closing.

But I no longer take pleasure in the suffering of these two former rival newspapers. I’ve come to realize, especially in the past several months, that it’s important that success return to these two. It’s important for the people in the two regions those newspapers serve.

I’m crossing my fingers for them and wishing the well.